Seemingly, one's identity should be sacrosanct, and I personally acknowledge the Macedonian right to refer to themselves as they wish, but it's a principle that should come with many caveats. Scratch the service in this case and you ask yourself, what if the identity in question was produced and reinforced as a means to dismember territory from another country? What if this same people held an aggrieved sense of injustice from the outcomes of WW1, WW2, the Greek Civil War, and for these reasons had instituted a propaganda campaign meant to brainwash the populace with totally indefensible propaganda that usurped a neighbor's history (Bulgaria has the same problem with FYROM)? What if the top politicians of this country often referred to the stealing of territory at the whims of the great powers? What if the rights to intervene in neighbor's affairs to protect Macedonians living in Greece were writ into the country's constitution? What if the symbol of the city of Saloniki was stamped on the money of that nation? etc.
Check out these state-sponsored newly issued encyclopedias & ads:
http://www.euractiv.com/en/enlargement/macedonia-embroiled-encyclopaedia-row/article-186333
http://www.rferl.org/content/Macedonian_Encyclopedia_Sparks_Balkan_Ethnic_Row/1830215.html
http://macedoniaonline.eu/content/view/8264/45/
This is a transcript of a 5 minute ad on state-sponsored television:
Divine blessing for you, my Macedonians. I have waited for thousands of years to be called by you. From always with you, from eternity I am coming, I am already among you because here neither time nor space exists. Here, at my place, the time is still. But at your place, the time is now, for me to explain. Your mother earth I have inhabited with three races: the White-Macedonoids, the Yellow-Mongoloids and the Black-Negroids. The rest-all are mulattoes. From you, Macedonians, the descendants of Macedon, I have impregnated the White race and everything began from you, to the Sea of Japan. All White people are your brothers because they carry Macedonian gene. And all the migrations started from your place towards the north. Kokino, Porodin, Radobor, Angelci, Barutnica, Govrlevo, wherever you dig you shall find the truth who you are, why you are and from where are you. Evil diabolic souls obscured the truth for thousands of years and lied to the world.
You couple this sort of thing with scientific "proof" presented that Greeks are sub-Saharan Africans, Albanians a nomadic tribe new to the scene, Bulgarians as falsifiers, etc., and what do you have? This comes from the country's intelligentsia and political leadership. That's not to say there aren't Greek bigots and racists and nationalists, but George Papandreou is not going to give seed money to the next Leni Riefenstahl.
So, to answer you, on the one hand you have the acknowledged history: The vast majority of historical Macedonia exists within Greece.
Whose Macedonia existed first? Greece's did. And I'm not talking about ancient history. You can read research that shows all sorts of Macedonian cultural associations in the area were Greek in the mid to late 19th century.
The Slavic Macedonian consciousness movement which came later was a response to battles between groups that formerly identified as Bulgarians.
And then, after you look at the history, the context for Macedonian identity is troubled. The seemingly innocuous principle of self-identification perturbs when that identity was constructed purposely in a propaganda war against a neighbor, an identity that was concocted initially for irredentist aspirations, and subsequently reinforced to cloak those same aspirations.
Either way, this will not end pretty.
